Following the announcement that Barnes & Noble (B&N) is to acquire Denver’s Tattered Cover – one the US’s most revered independent bookshop – B&N CEO James Daunt has sort to reassure customers that “this isn’t & Noble isn’t coming in, as such. It’s providing all of the structure. We’re there to provide all that is necessary for the teams to run a good bookstore. Tattered Cover is going to figure out how it becomes Tattered Cover again.”
In an interview with the Denver Post, he made clear that this wasn’t about running Tattered Cover from a centralised head office, but rather was all about local empowerment. It’s the store team that runs a good bookstore, whether it’s the Barnes & Noble in Fort Collins or Tattered Cover here,” Daunt said. “Some of them will do it brilliantly, some of them will do it shockingly awfully and some of them in between.”
In the UK, Waterstones runs Blackwells, Foyles, Hatchards, as well as Hodges Figgis in Dublin, under their own names and with their own particular style. He told the paper: “What we’ve done is really empower those teams to reinvent themselves back to what they were,” Daunt said. “Hatchards now is most definitely not a Waterstones. It’s Hatchards. It’s a very, very distinct and different bookstore and dramatically more successful as a consequence of that.”
B&N has offered $1.83m in cash to buy Tattered Cover out of bankruptcy, covering $50,000 in back rent and $1.6 million in secured debt the store owes. Tattered Cover’s parent company, Bended Page, approved the offer June 17, but the agreement needs the approval of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Denver. The closing is set to take place by July 31.
Daunt added: “I’m a student of other bookstores. I visited Tattered Cover in the past,” Daunt told The Denver Post while sitting at a table among the bookcases at the store’s main location on Denver’s East Colfax Avenue. It’s obviously one of the great names in bookselling.”